Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

Feature request: HN could support a tag or label for categorizing a post. This would allow for filtering trivially, and creating views based on participant interest.

This post is turning up at least every other day. The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.

I am wondering what the ratio is for VC and angel dealflow in the valley right now.

Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.

Prevention of bots and other kinds of automation takes precedence over any thematic changes.

If that is done first, we might not need to separate subjects.

HN lacks even the most basic aspects of human verification.

Unfortunately, this is simply a by product of the fact that this is both news and the state of the world.

Like most it too will come to pass (as it is further adopted in the mainstream and becomes commonplace).

curious, couldn't AL/llm related content also have interesting new information? im not referring to ai generated sloppy articles. more so the deep tech behind it. personally im super interested in machine learning and love it when i come across such links here.

No, I have zero interest in LLM and ignoring the posts has worked fine for me. The political posts are causing more damage IMO. There is also a "hide" button if you keep seeing a lingering high activity post.

No, will go away just like all the crypto stuff - remember that time? - went away.

No, it is not time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other".

I enjoy the website as-is, and simply use search when I want to get to the topics that interest me.

Vibe code a browser extension that uses a cheap LLM to filter out content that you don't want to see.

No for three reasons.

One, lets be honest, hn wont do it, part of their secret sauce is that they don't change, and they know that.

Two, fragmenting the community would just reduce engagement and risk making both feel like a ghost town.

Three, LLMs are (one of) the forefronts of our industry. State of the art is advancing fast. It has properties that no one knows the best practises for. And it has implications that are wide ranging. To try and bury this because it has a lot of new developments goes against why most of us are on this site.

I believe in the meritocracy of the upvote button.

Maybe we could fork it into technical discussions and complaints about technical discussions.

My experience with HackerNews would be significantly improved if I could exclude the LLM-related stuff... it's overwhelming.

I havent been on here forever, but I vaguely remember other trends took over for certain periods. I could be misremembering, but crypto drove a lot of interaction for a while. I'm indifferent towards LLMs, probably because I'm not a developer in my day job, and I don't mind seeing LLM posts. It is annoying that every single LLM thread devolves into the same tired arguments between LLM zealots and detractors.

> I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

I've had the exact same feeling a lot over the past couple years or so, and especially the last 6 months. I used to hit the front page and find 5 to 10 stories I was interested in. Exhausting those to read the second or third page wasn't common. Now I find maybe one story I want, and I routinely will scan through 4 or 5 pages (down to 120 to 160) and only find a handful (4 or 5) that I want to read.

I've long found myself wishing for mini-HNs on different broad topics that interest me. Sadly this was the whole point/idea behind reddit. For example, besides the actual and venerable and loved real HN, I'd love an HN for:

1. Politics: Where disagreements are encouraged and any claims are challenged, but only with factual arguments/counterarguments, and any emotional arguments are moderated (basically how we encourage HN comments to be). There have been some reddit communities over the years doing this, but IME they frequently devolve into echo chambers. It almost always comes down to bad moderators.

2. General News: Where stuff that is of broad interest (and not really tech-related) can be posted and commented on in thoughtful ways. Particularly local news would be fun

3. <placeholder>: Had an idea and forgot it as I was making the list. Will edit and insert when I remember!

I've kind of accepted that my dream just can't work (at least, looking at Reddit as the great experimentation of that). People on the internet are just (generally speaking) incapable of consistently humanizing the user(s) on the other end, and proceed to treat others very poorly. Pride and inability to be wrong strongly exacerbate that tendency.

Honestly, I’ve always appreciated how much of 2007 Hacker News is still intact. It remains one of the few places on the internet where discovery still happens organically without trending algorithms or clickbait optimization. It's just manual submissions, one by one.

There’s only one other community I’ve encountered like it, run by a small liberal arts college.

From a signals perspective, HN is incredibly valuable. You get to watch in real time what’s capturing the minds of technically inclined readers. Sure, that means lots of lurkers and a few dominant topics (right now: AI). But that’s also kind of the point. HN works as a reflection of where the collective attention is, whether we like it or not.

Anyways...just two cents.

I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but for other topics that some people dislike.

They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy"

Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B.

To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"

Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community. Directing a community to divide to remove an element you dislike is an attempt to appropriate the established community.

Maybe someone could make an AI service to separate them out.

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered

It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out.

You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage.

o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0...

Initial prompt was:

  Build a web tool that displays the Hacker
  News homepage (fetched from the Algolia API)
  but filters out specific search terms,
  default to "llm, ai" in a box at the top but
  the user can change that list, it is stored
  in localstorage. Don't use React.

Then four follow-ups:

  Rename to "Hacker News, filtered" and add a
  clear label that shows that the terms will
  be excluded

  Turn the username into a link to
  https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xxx -
  include the comment count, which is in the
  num_comments key

  The text "392 comments" should be the link,
  do not have a separate thread link

  Add a tooltip to "1 day ago" that shows the
  full value from created_at

AI/LLM has become of core part of IT. If you don't want AI then it seems like you want a retro-computing news aggregator or just HN minus personal annoyances. I get it, sometimes I want the simpler days but as long as the AI/LLM posts are not dumbed down mainstream content I'm interested it them and most visitors probably are also. I wouldn't have discovered most of the articles from other places. The posts match the site's on-topic criteria, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I've gradually come around to reading and engaging more with AI-related topics, but I'd still appreciate this. The balance of the content is way off.

No.

There's always a flavor of the month. Go back 3-5 years and every third post was crypto or NFT related. AI/LLM too will pass.

I've never really understood this desire of people to effectively hide content that doesn't interest them. Just... ignore it. Like there are enough people on HN who really care about academia and research. I don't. But that's fine. Let them be.

But here's the interesting part: so many on HN rail against the newsfeed concept . You will hear a significant number of HNers say they just want everything in chronological order. Well, except for the subjects that don't interest them.

If HN submissions were tagged and a recommendation algorithm decided what to show you, you'd get exactly what you want: fewer AI/LLM posts if that doesn't interest you. But somehow newsfeeds are still bad?

you're seeing more that content because it is relevant. HN should show relevant topics in tech. the AI/LLM domination of tech as a whole is what you're seeing on HN. There is lobste.rs which might be what you're looking for.

I mean, just don't click on an AI story.

If you think HN AI/LLM content is bad, try LinkedIn or X!

HN is probably the best source of informed, critical takes on AI/LLM content and that is super valuable to me. I don't think it should fork; I want the same audience to keep doing its work and having the debates :P.